I made a Doom-like game fit inside a QR code
I sometimes pick up random projects just because I can, this was one of those times. I made it as a week long project a while back this year but never shared here, so thought to go for it haha. I created a game inspired by Doom and the backrooms called The Backdooms under 2.4kb in minified html. (for reference, this entire post would be around 1.8kB haha) I had to use a not popular way of using GZip with Zlib headers (had to write my own script for compressing it, also in the repo) to eventually convert it a size 40 QR code that works right in your browser using Decompressionstream API. This…
I made a Doom-like game fit inside a QR code launched on April 18, 2025 with 531 votes, #26 of 7,818 launches that month and more than 99% of that year's launches. The site was still online in September 2026, 1 year on.
In plain words
The Backdooms is a Doom-inspired game compressed into a 2.4KB HTML file that runs directly from a QR code in the browser. Built as a week-long project, it combines raycasting technology similar to the original Doom with procedurally generated maps. The creator developed custom compression scripts using GZip with Zlib headers to fit the playable game into a size-40 QR code, utilizing the browser's Decompressionstream API to decompress and run it. The tool is for developers interested in extreme code compression and retro-style game design.
written from the facts on this page · September 2026
From the sources
A self-contained game that fits inside a QR code inspired by DOOM 1993 and The Backrooms - Kuberwastaken/backdooms
Yes, this is literally the entire game. You can scan it to play. The Backdooms is a compressed, self-extracting and infinitely generating HTML game inspired by DOOM 1993 and The Backrooms that can be launched and played in a web browser directly from a QR code. This project was a week-long study I performed (now slightly longer) designed to push the limits of QR code storage and compression, to demonstrate an innovative method of hosting lightweight web applications entirely within a QR code. ✅ Fully Offline: No internet connection is required to play the game after scanning the QR code. The URL basically has the ENTIRE code to the game ✅ Extreme Compression: Utilizes a combination of Zlib…from github.com
In the maker’s words, at launch
I sometimes pick up random projects just because I can, this was one of those times. I made it as a week long project a while back this year but never shared here, so thought to go for it haha. I created a game inspired by Doom and the backrooms called The Backdooms under 2.4kb in minified html. (for reference, this…
Does a similar job
all alternatives →- D1Doom (1993) in a PDF2025 · doompdf.pages.dev · ▲369
I made a Doom source port that runs within a PDF file. I was inspired by the recent HN post about Tetris in a PDF (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42645218) and I wondered if I could get Doom to run using a similar method. It turns out that old versions of Emscripten can compile C to asm.js code that will happily run inside the limited JS runtime of the PDF engine. I used the doomgeneric (https://github.com/ozkl/doomgeneric) fork of the original Doom source, as that made writing the IO fairly easy. All I had to do was implement a framebuffer and…
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I've seen some interests in (simulation) video games here on HN so I thought I'd share a short version of our story. More than 6 years ago, me and my friend from university were playing around with an idea of making a game we always wanted to play. We worked on it on weekends but the progress was quite slow, especially due to so many dead ends and wasted effort. Eventually however, we solidified our direction and decided to take the risk to resign from our well paid SWE jobs and work on it full time. It took more than a year but yesterday we have finally released it on Steam:…
- IMI made a web game called Almost Pong2022 · lessmilk.com · ▲1,135
Hi HN! I made many small web games in the past with Unity or Phaser. But this time I wanted to make something completely on my own. So I coded a basic game framework in plain JavaScript, and used it to make Almost Pong. This was a really fun project that taught me a lot about JavaScript, and I plan to make more minimalist games with this framework. Interesting fact: Almost Pong doesn't load any assets, all sprites and sounds are generated with code. Happy to answer questions, and please let me know if you have any feedback on the game. Thanks!
I wrote a DOOM clone in my own programming languageApr 2026 · spectrelang.org · ▲34
TTF-DOOM – A raycaster running inside TrueType font hintingApr 2026 · github.com · ▲68TrueType fonts have a hinting VM that grid-fits glyphs. It has a stack, storage area, conditionals, function calls, and it turns out it's Turing-complete. So I built a raycasting engine in the hinting bytecode. The glyph "A" in the font has 16 vertical bar contours. The hinting program reads player coordinates from font variation axes via GETVARIATION, does DDA ray marching against a tile map in the storage area, and repositions bar heights with SCFS. It ends up looking like a crude Wolfenstein-style view. Small visuzlization:…
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Source: Show HN post ↗ · launch text quoted in part
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